Upper-class English in real life: The Royal Family

Abstract

The ‘Queen’s English’ The ‘Queen’s English’ ‘Queen’s English’ is, together with ‘BBC English,’ one of the alternative names given to Received Pronunciation in non-scholarly literature. The Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary and Thesaurus defines it as “the English language as it is spoken in the south of England, considered by some people as a standard of good English,” thus implying that the language of the Queen is the emblem of this spoken variety. However, it was pointed out in the previous chapters that it is certainly a fact that the English nobility and the Royal Family speak RP, but they speak a ‘heightened’ version of it that can be called U-RP, following Wells’s terminology (1992).